Curious Connectivity Problem

WinXP Home, IE6

My wife's computer was set up with two user accounts, one for each of us.
I rarely use my account. Today, I tried using it and discovered a curious
situation while accessing web sites with IE6.

If I use IE6 on her account, everything behaves normally.

But when I access the same sites from my user account, I get frequent
"failure to connect "error 12029" errors. The log from the connectivity
tool seems to show that while HTTPS sites load normally, HTTP accounts don't
connect.

Obviously both her account and mine share the identical DSL wired
connection.

Suggestions welcome.
_____

PT